In recent years, the replacement of television advertisements with targeted television advertisements has become an increasingly important advertising method. Content providers such as television networks routinely insert generic advertisements into streamed network television content. For example, a content provider (e.g., a national cable television network such as ESPN) provides a network feed that contains embedded interstitial advertisements to content distributors (e.g., a cable affiliates such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable). Such advertisements routinely include advertisements for credit cards, national retailers or other products with broad appeal. A content distributor or a content provider may, want to be able to substitute a replacement advertisement for the advertisement inserted in the broadcast feed. Merely substituting in a replacement advertisement for local businesses, such as a car dealership or a real estate agent does not provide sufficient targeting for the advertisements. While the advertisement is local it still may have no relevancy to an individual viewer. Thus, conventional methods of providing replacement content (e.g., inserting targeted advertisements) fail to provide sufficiently sophisticated and accurate targeting of replacement media content while maintaining the simplicity of media systems. Rather, it would be valuable to advertisers and thus to content providers to be able to insert highly targeted advertisements based on other specific information about the likely viewer of the advertisement.
Additionally, producers and distributors of content are looking for new ways to add value to provided content and to monetize the content. End-users will typically find more added value and be more receptive to supplemental information that is related to the content being displayed on a media system. However, conventional methods of identifying content being displayed at a media system are slow, inaccurate or require excessive processing power. Thus, it would also be valuable to producers and distributors of content to have a way to quickly, accurately and efficiently determine the content that is to be displayed at a media system and customize the content so as to provide additional value to end-users and/or provide new ad impressions for advertisers that are likely to be viewed by the end-users.